11 November 2012

Last year, I interviewed
the head of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, about his own career, and
about his organisation. That interview took place at the first
European LinuxCon, which was held in Prague. This year, it took place
in Barcelona, and I took the opportunity to catch up with Zemlin on what
had happened in the intervening time (disclosure: the Linux Foundation
paid for my travelling and accommodation while I was there.)

Last week's big announcement
by the UK government was principally about procurement, detailing the
new rules that will apply when government departments acquire software.
Naturally, then, it concentrated on the details of that approach, and
how it would be deployed and enforced. A key part of that was using
open standards to create a level playing field for all companies,
regardless of whether they offered open source or proprietary code.

In the wake of the news that Android sales now represent around 75% of the global smartphone market
during the most recent quarter, there's still some surprise that this
has happened. After all, this was a sector that Apple absolutely
dominated just a few years ago. Some find it hard to understand how
Android has pulled this off in just five years.

A little while back, Techdirt wrote about a rather brave French company that tried to trademark the Anonymous logo. Now Der Spiegel is reporting that someone wants a German "wordmark" on the "@" sign (original in German). The company involved has the rather unusual name "@ T.E.L.L.",
where the initials apparently stand for "Tradinghouse for Exclusive
Luxury Labels". Although it's not really clear what the connection is,
it is seeking to protect its use of the @-symbol for various classes of
luxury goods (application in German), including the following:

The laws governing intellectual monopolies in the UK are in a state
of flux at the moment. After the previous government in its dying hours
rammed through
the shoddy piece of work known as the Digital Economy Act, the present
coalition government took a more rational approach by commissioning the Hargreaves Review
into the impact of digital technologies on this area. One of its key
proposals was that policy should be based on evidence, not
"lobbynomics"; the fact that this even needs to be mentioned says much
about the way laws have been framed until now.

One of the main forces driving the move to open access is the idea
that if the public has already paid for research through taxation or
philanthropy, then it's not reasonable to ask people to pay again in
order to read the papers that are published as a result. The strength
of this argument is probably why, in part, open access continues to gain
wider acceptance around the world.

In a huge win for open standards, open source and the public, the
long-awaited UK government definition of open standards has come down
firmly on the side of RF, not FRAND. The UK government's approach is enshrined in an important new document defining what it calls Open Standards Principles.
Annex 1 provides definitions and a glossary, including the following
crucial definition of what is required for a standard to be considered
open:

Although crowdsourcing is all the rage at the moment, there has to be
a worry that this is just the latest fad in the world of technology,
and will soon follow portals and the blink tag into justified oblivion.
Occasionally, though, an application of crowdsourcing appears that
seems to address a real problem in a way that would be otherwise
intractable.

One of the premises of this blog is that the success and methodology
of open source are not one-offs, but part of a larger move towards open,
collaborative activity. Thus, by observing what open source does well -
and not so well - lessons can be learned that can be applied in quite
different fields.

There is a natural tendency to accentuate the negative when it comes
to drones -- concentrating on how these "spies the sky" represent a
threat to privacy and civil liberties. But as Techdirt has reported before, there are other applications that many might find not just acceptable but welcome. And that's not surprising: like the Internet, drones are just a neutral tool, and as such can be deployed for both good and bad purposes.

As you may have gathered, I'm a big fan of consultations: if they are
asking us what we think, we really ought not pass up the chance of
telling them. Sometime those consultations concern extremely specific
and urgent matters, like surveillance or net neutrality, and sometimes
they are more general. Here's an example of the latter:

Whatever your views on the value of Wikileaks, one of its useful
side-effects has been the appearance of other sites that have tried to
do a similar job of calling the powerful to account using leaked
information, but at a more local level. One of the most successful of
these is BalkanLeaks, created
by the Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen
Yordanov. In fact, it's been rather too successful for some, and is now on the receiving end of some legal threats, as a column in Forbes explains:

Yesterday I wrote
about an extraordinarily clueless document from an arm of the UN that
seemed to have no real understanding of what the Internet was, how
people used it, or what should be done to build on its strengths. The
awfulness of that report contrasts painfully with a recent paper from
another international agency, the OECD.

Back in May, Techdirt pointed to a presentation
from Mike Palmedo listing a wide range of research that demonstrates
the lack of a connection between policies introducing stricter IP laws
or enforcement and economic growth or innovation.
Apparently, the African Union Scientific, Technical and Research
Commission didn't get around to reading that post, since it has produced
a draft statute for the creation of a new Pan-Africa Intellectual
Property Organization that seems based entirely on assuming this link
exists.

The demonization of file sharing by copyright maximalists blinds many
companies to the fact that it is marketing in its purest form. That's
because people naturally only share stuff they think is good, and thus
everything on file sharing networks comes with an implicit
recommendation from someone. Not only that, but those works that appear
on file sharing networks the most are, again by definition, those that
are regarded mostly highly by the filesharing public as a whole, many of
whom are young people, a key target demographic for most media
companies.

Whether or not you believe that CCTV surveillance makes the world a
safer place, there's a big problem with deploying it more widely: you
still need someone to look at that footage and pick out the things of
interest, and it's much harder adding new personnel than adding new
cameras.

It's a cliché that we live in a world increasingly awash with digital
data. Even though it all comes down to 1s and 0s, not all data is
equally important or valuable. Data about clinical trials, for example,
is literally a matter of life and death, since it is used to determine
whether new drugs should be approved and how they should be used. That
gives clinical data a critical role in the approval process: results
that support the use of a new drug can lead to big profits, while
negative results can mean years of expensive research and development
have to be discarded.

One of the most important pieces of research to emerge last year was "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies".
A central theme was that much unauthorized copying around the world is
driven by attempts to impose Western-level prices everywhere, resulting
in media goods that are simply beyond the reach of most people in
countries whose economies are still developing.

In the online world, it's hard to remember a time before Amazon.
Today, it dominates the ecommerce space, and is rapidly becoming equally
dominant in the ebook world. Against that background, a story that
broke yesterday is rather worrying.

A post on The Next Web reminds us that the CD is thirty years old this month.
As the history there explains, work began back in the 1970s at both
Philips and Sony on an optical recording medium for music, which
culminated in a joint standard launched in 1982. The key attribute of
the compact disc was not so much its small size -- although that was the
most obvious difference from earlier vinyl -- but that fact that it
stored music in a digital, rather than analog format.

Last month I wrote
about the "clean and open Internet" consultation being carried out by
the European Commission, and pointed out that many of the E-commerce
Directive's measures mapped quite neatly onto some of the worst ideas of
ACTA. Maybe it won't turn out to be as bad
as it looks, but it's hard not to get the impression that the European
Commission is determined to push through similar measures, by hook or by
crook, not least when there things like this crawl out of the woodwork:

Last week Mike wrote
about a new patent from Intellectual Ventures that seeks to assert
ownership of the idea of DRM for 3D printing. The article in Technology
Review that Techdirt linked to explains how things would work:

A couple of weeks ago, we reported
that Rupert Murdoch's paywall at the London Times isn't looking like a
huge success. That won't come as a surprise to Techdirt readers, but
does raise the question: if newspapers can't use paywalls alongside ads
to fund journalists, what can they turn to? Here's a revolutionary
idea: why not let the people who know and care most about the title -- the readers -- get more closely involved?
That's precisely what the Berlin-based newspaper Die Tageszeitung,
affectionately known as "Taz", has done. Here's the Guardian's
description of how it came about:

Back in February I wrote
about an exciting project from the Cabinet Office: a complete overhaul
of the UK government's "citizen-facing" Web sites. It was exciting in
part because it was rather good, which made a nice change for a
government computing project, but more particularly because it was open
source through and through.

Long-suffering readers may recall that the issue of FRAND licensing
in the context of open standards cropped up quite a lot this year. We
still don't know what the final outcome of the UK consultation on open
standards will be, but whatever happens there, we can be sure that FRAND will remain one of the hot topics.

One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so
easy to set up: you don't need a printing press or huge numbers of
journalists -- you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and
you are away. That is, you do unless you happen to live in Bangladesh,
where new regulations will make it much harder to set up news sites, as this story from Access Now explains:

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.